Gasholders I have known and loved ........... no 3 inside the Rochdale Gas works

Now I am well aware this is a cheat ............. less a gasholder and more the inside of the Rochale Road Gas works.

But I have included it the series Gasholders.

The picture is entitled Gas Works Drawing Coke Rochdale Road and dates from 1894.

This was the time when “town gas” was manufactured on site and didn’t come down a pipe from the North Sea or in a container ship from somewhere on the other side of the world.

Back in 1894 Henry Tidmarsh recorded this one along with over 300 other  illustrations for the book Manchester Old and New which  was published in 1894 by Cassell with a text by William Arthur Shaw.

In three big volumes it told the history of the city but the real value of the book was in Tidmarsh's vivid depictions of Manchester, with streets and buildings animated with people.

Pictures; Gas Works Drawing Coke Rochdale Road, 1894, Henry Tidmarsh, from Manchester Old and New, William Arthur Shaw, 1894

*Gasholders,https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Gasholders

Will those responsible ……… return the drinking fountain to the Rec on Beech Road

It is one of those silly stories which started with a couple of pictures of the Rec in the early morning.

Early morning on the Rec, 2021

And progressed through to a newspaper report from September 1897 of an ordinary meeting of the Withington Urban District Council at which Mr. Burgess “intimated that a gentleman in Manchester, whose name he would not at present mention, had offered to give a drinking fountain to be placed in Chorlton-cum-Hardy”.*

I had been looking for information about the early years of the Recreation Ground on Beech Road.**

It had been opened in the May of 1896, and was gift form Lord Egerton of a strip of land which had for centuries been known as Row Acre.***

And here I went very  wrong, because so engrossed was I in the research that the fountain and the Rec came together and for a brief while I went searching for just where the drinking fountain might have been located on what is now called Beech Road Park.

Waiting for something to happen, 2021

All of which will allow Mr. Pedantic of Provis Road to mumble that the story is a nonsense, and artificially connects pictures of the Rec on a Tuesday morning with the real drinking fountain which was on Chorlton Green.

And he would be right, leaving me to reflect on that earlier bit of public open space which is surrounded by two pubs, the old parish burial ground, the village school along with two former farm houses.

Today most of us think of Chorlton green as an open space of grass ringed by trees but this was not how it has always been.

Before the turn of the 19th century it may have been much bigger and indeed for most of that century was not even open to the people of the village, having been enclosed by Samuel Wilton and not returned to public use until the 1890s.

And then for a great stretch of time remained without grass but did have a pretty neat water fountain.

The Green, circa 1900

The picture dates from 1906 when the Horse and Jockey was still just a set of beer rooms on either side of the main door, Miss Wilton’s outhouse still jutted out from the building and the space between the main entrance and the sweet shop was still a private residence.

I have always liked the lamp which stands on the green, with its hint of Narnia.

And back in the May of 1986 I can remember walking past it in the early evening and coming across a string quartet playing around its base.  Today people would just take it in their stride mutter something about it being typically Chorlton, but back then it struck me as the promise of things to come.

Which later that night with the defeat of the Conservative candidate and the election of the first Labour Councillor it  indeed seem to herald something new.

But being a historian I have to own up to the fact that the following year the Conservatives were back but they were on borrowed time, and 1987 marked the final year that a Conservative would be elected from Chorlton to the Town Hall.

The year before may have been the first string quartet on the green but it has not been the last.

The drinking fountain, circa 190o

I have to say I prefer the grass but lament the loss of the fountain.  

First it lost its cups and then vanished sometime in the 1920s or 30s.  To my mind that was a loss.  Public fountains are wonderful places to meet people, spend time chatting and just having a drink on a hot day.

Once it would have been the village pump which offered all three and which on hot summer days had the added bonus of a place the kids could play.

Now there is a lot more history to explore in the photograph of the fountain but I rather think I will leave that for another time.

To which Michael Wood has added, "My recollection is that the fountain on the rec was located centrally outside the shelter, as on the attached snip from the georeferenced maps website showing OS 25” 1892-1914 series.  

It was the same design as was used in Chorlton Park near the tennis courts, a perfunctory iron structure with domed hoods over the outlets, operated by a button on top -  nothing like the elaborate ornamental feature on the Green.  Can’t find an image at the moment, but I could draw one!  

The Rec, 1914

They must have been a common municipal feature in their time, but by the mid-sixties they were semi-functioning or defunct. "

And I hope he does, as it is I never knew about the bandstand.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; the Rec very early on a Tuesday morning from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the drinking fountain on the green, circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection

*District Councils, Manchester Guardian, September 10th, 1897

**Public Recreation Grounds at Withington, Manchester Guardian, May 18th, 1896

***Breaking News ……….. the Rec on Beech Road is officially opened, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/04/breaking-news-rec-on-beech-road-is.html

Passing Burton's on Well Hall Road to the sound of Betty Everitt and Judy Street

Now I have fond memories of the old Burton’s at the top of Well Hall Road.

It was here that I bought my first suit, more than a few shirts and the odd tie, although I do confess it ran a poor second to Harry Fenton's and even Payne's on the High Street.

Of course there will be those with equally happy stories to tell of the dances that were held upstairs.

Not that I ever went.

During the mid 60s I still commuted back to New Cross for school and so had yet to find friends in Eltham and by the time I started at Crown Woods in 1966 there were plenty of other places to go with the shed load of new people I had met.

That said on the long walks back from Grove Park after an evening with Ann I did sometime pass the dance hall after one of the more rowdy evenings.

And that is a shame because it will have been there that I guess I would have herd live versions of Betty Everitt’s  Getting Mighty Crowded* and Judy Street’s What.**

It would be years later in Manchester at the Twisted Wheel and later still at Placemate that I would fully come to appreciate these songs.

And I still have a fond spot for the opening lines of Getting Mighty Crowded, with its message of losing a lover ........................

“I'm packing up my memories
And I'm gonna move
On out of your heart

Turning in my keys
And I'm gonna move
On out of your heart

Cause there ain't
Room enough for two
And sharing your heart
With someone new
Will never do"

At which point I suppose I should launch into the story of Burton’s which replaced the Congregational Church and was itself supplanted by a Big Mac.

But I won’t instead I shall go off and listen to Betty Everitt who sadly is no longer with us and Judy Street who still is.

Picture; looking west down the High Street, 2014, from the collection of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick & Jean Gammons, 2013

* Getting Mighty Crowded, Betty Everitt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AmwoK6uw5Q


** What, Judy Street, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2NySUcbv3w

What do we do with an Empire? ……. the answer from 1945

 I suppose I was the last generation which went through school being taught that the “sun never set on the British Empire”.

It was a grandiose boast which in my junior school was backed up with wall maps displaying a quarter of the world coloured red, and text books which were full of heroic figures of Empire.

And this was despite the fact that India “the Jewel in the Crown of Empire” had become two independent countries two years before I was born, followed during the 1950s and early 60s by a big chunk of that red.

Not that this had been arrived at entirely peacefully.  

The resistance of indigenous peoples through the 19th and early 20th centuries to British rule was matched by the colonial independence movements that followed the Second World War, with groups in Palestine wanting an independent Jewish state, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and EOKA in Cyprus.

All of which was recognized by Harold Macmillan in his “winds of change” speech in February 1960 which was made against the backdrop of France’s defeat in Indo China and its continuing brutal colonial war in Algeria.

So while Britain may have divested itself of most of its empire with a degree of good grace, it wasn’t entirely done without a measure of resistance, which was overlooked by those teaching us the history of Empire.

Nor of course were we made privy to the degree of exploitation and savagery which marked the acquisition of that empire, all of which is now presented in scholarly and expensive books, some of which are more readable than others.

What they have in common of course is that the story is over, and while we still live with the legacy of empire, from the debates around Black Lives Matter, to the continued impoverishment of certain Commonwealth countries, the debate on what should happen to the Empire is over.

Not so in 1945, when Alexander Campbell published his book It’s Your Empire, which was a Left Book Club Edition.*

Britain had only just come out of the war, a war which had been prosecuted by units of the armed forces drawn from almost all of the Empire many of whom were volunteers.

So I was intrigued by Mr. Cambell’s book which has sat on a shelf for over 40 years, but which I have never read.

The Manchester Guardian described it as “a rapid and up-to-date survey of current Colonial problems in their current guise.  The reader is conducted from the West India to the Mediterranean, the Middle East & Africa; then to India & Ceylon, the Fra East & the Western Pacific.  Nor are the outlying islands such as Mauritious & St Helena overlooked.  It is a full your of the dependent Empire.  The result is a valuable and vivid conspectus …. By the author of Empire in Africa & Smuts and the Swastika”.**

And at the outset, Mr. Campbell dispels a serious of myths and misunderstandings about the Empire and its history, beginning with that much hawked myth that “the British are supposed to have acquired it in a fit of absentmindedness”, and that the public were well informed about all things Empire.

Going on to point out that “large parts of the Empire were ‘collected’ comparatively recently, with huge tracts of Africa and many Pacific islands becoming British possessions only in the last few decades”.

This he cites as one reason for the public’s ignorance about Empire, along with the events of two world wars and the Depression, which perforce had concentrated minds on more pressing things.

To which he adds that people had been very badly informed.  “In schools, children have been told that the Empire is a big happy , united  ‘loyal’ family and that the burning ambition of every little Indian, African and Malayan boy is to die  for the Union Jack”.

But the book is more than just a broad diatribe on the Empire, and instead looks at each of the British possessions, examining the present as well as the historical economic background, supported by a bank of Government statistics which point to to the unequal relationship of many of the indigenous peoples to the ruling elite and the way that those “home peoples” have and were being exploited.

My own interest in the Middle East drew me to his section on Palestine and the conflict between the Arab and Jewish populations, but those on the other parts of the Empire are equally instructive.

And as ever the book was at its best when quoting the figures which dispel some of the myths, like “One third of all registered deaths in the British Colonial Empire are caused by tuberculosis, pneumonia and bronchitis; pellagra and scurvy are widespread , worm infestations almost universal in many regions and in West Africa, venereal disease afflicts 50 to 90 per cent of the population.

In every colony many if not most children suffer from malnutrition, and in some some African and Eastern towns the infantile death-rate is between 40 and 50 percent. Conditions in India are no better.  These facts are culled from the official report  of the Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire”.

But the book looks to a positive and optimistic future, where the colonies become independent, but need to be supported arguing, “The colonies have ceased to be what they were in the past -treasure-houses of loot.  

The treasures have been removed; they went to to build Liverpool and Manchester. If the colonies are not to become the world’s waste lands, gigantic sums will have to be spent on combating soil erosion, rooting out disease, banishing malnutrition, and rehousing, reclothing and educating the people”.

And the book draws on the voices of those indigenous peoples like that from the manifesto of the Federation of Trade Unions of Nigeria which concluded, "The free peoples of the world look forward with intense eagerness to the fast approaching post-war years, when attention will be focused on the extermination of poverty, unemployment, excessive hours of work , and low wages, and Nigeria is not an exception …. [we shall] tenaciously explore all available constitutional  means with a view to achieving for the average worker such favourable conditions as ensure to a citizen under the British flag”.

So an interesting book, written a full two years before the independence of India, just months after the end of the war.

And a book still available.

Pictures; Ceylon, 1944 from the collection of Bob Ward

* It’s Your Empire, Alexander Campbell, 1945, Left Book Club Edition, Victor Gollancz

**It’s Your Empire, Manchester Guardian, October 14th, 1945

On the streets of Manchester, polishing shoes, selling food and offering up fun balloons

It is one of those things about city life that there is always someone who will sell you almost anything.

Just over a hundred years ago down by the Cathedral walls, the artist H.Tidmarsh recorded the old man selling newspapers, a woman selling potatoes and a boy polishing shoes, while up by the Infirmary at the top of Market Street he painted another street vendor selling food.

Not far away by Hunts Bank late at night young children plied the streets selling newspapers in the early hours of the morning.

And a century and a bit later, out on Market Street the crowd surged past the burger van, negotiated the balloon man, and stopped to buy a political paper.

Pictures; Manchester street sellers by H.E. Tidmarsh from Manchester Old and New, William Arthur Shaw, 1894 and from the collection of Andrew Simpson, June 2013

And over the next few weeks I shall focus on more of the street vendors who plied the streets of Manchester  in the late 19th century and their counterparts who still do the same business today.

Jack Beasley ……… his collection of Chorlton pictures ……. and a story … part 1

This is Chequers Road, sometime in the 1940s.

Chequers Road/Church Road circa 1940s

Of course, back then it was Church Road, and it is one of a remarkable collection of family snaps belonging to Kirsty.

Her family have lived in Chorlton for over 80 years and many of the photographs are of this one road

Her dad lived at number 41, and as they say the cross in the picture marks the spot.

Walk along the road today and the scene is pretty much the same, barring the inevitable number of cars and the lack of net curtains which were still a badge of respectability.

Outside 39 Church Road, with the "criss cross brown paper", circa 1939-45

Now if I wanted to hazard a guess, I think our picture will predate 1939, or certainly have been taken after 1945.

And the clue is in the absence of “the criss cross brown paper anti blast tape at the windows”, which Jack Beasley refers to on another of the pictures which was taken in the garden of 39 Church Road during the last world war.

The group consist of “Gerald Booth left, Jack Beasley, right, Gerald Vodon, [below] left, and Phyllis Vodon, [below] right”.

 Flo Beasley, date unknown

I know Kirsty has done some family research and the stories of the four will feature later, but for now I am intrigued by the unknown woman posing with a bunch of flowers.

I think she will be in the front garden of number 43, because comparing the image with others the front gate behind her is a match for number 41.*

And a trawl of the 1939 Register shows a Mrs Pauline Donbavand listed as living there along with her husband and Walter Meadows who was a Police Constable.

Pauline gave her occupation as a “Theatre Usherette”, had been born in 1909 and was two years younger than her husband.  

There is a slight confusion of the spelling of her surname which is a little unclear from the official record and Police Constable Meadows is listed as married but his wife is missing.

But like census returns, the 1939 Register was conducted on one night in early September and Mrs Meadows may have been elsewhere.

Added to which our unknown lady may not be Mrs Donbavand.  

According to Kirsty  she  could actually be  "my grandmother Flo Beasley", and certainly looking at family photographs there is a resemblance between the lady with the flowers and her grandmother.

So I rather think that is our mystery woman.

Outside 41/43 Church Road, date unknown

Equally intriguing is the way that some entries are redacted, so while Florence, Lilian and George Beasley appear, another two are hidden from view. 

That said I know that Florence was a “Bedding Machinist”, Lillian a “Shorthand typist” and George a "sapper" in the “Royal Engineers”, added to which an official returned to the list and changed Lillian’s status from single to married and including her new surname of Symonds.

There was nothing odd in the official alterations, as the 1939 Register was a working document and was used both for compiling the war time Identity cards, and for the new National Health Service which came into being in 1948.

Leaving me just to reflect that 83 years ago the occupations of those on Church Road, included two “house painters and paper hangers” a “retired Foreman lamp lighter”, an “Electrical engineer” along with a "chimney sweep", "a salesman", and a lorry driver.  With these were the familiar “unpaid domestic duties” and with a nod to the war, an “Auxiliary Fireman based at No.158 Manchester", and a number of servicemen.

I wonder what a contemporary tally of occupations would reveal.

Location; Chequers Road/Church Road, Chorlton

Pictures; Church Road circa 1939-45, from the collection of Kirsty

*There is however one hiccup and that is the modern street numbers for 41 and 43, do not correspond to what I think was the case in 1939 which may mean there was a change of numbers after 1939 ..... or I have just got it wrong.

 

Well Hall on a wet day in 1964

Now just what do you do on a Saturday morning in early July when the rain is coming down like stair rods?

I rather think an adventure in the woods is pretty much out of the question and likewise the attractions of the market in Beresford Square or the ferry fall away as the rain just keeps falling.

After all even the upbeat market stall holders found their quick fire banter and optimistic sales pitch a bit harder when everything felt damp, while the sight of the Thames held little appeal when the rain clouds all but touched the water.

There were Saturday morning pictures but at 14 that all seemed a bit below me which just left the Library on the High Street and the bus ride down to Avery Hill.

In 1964 it would be a good two years before I started at Crown Woods and so this end of Eltham was still unexplored territory.

I am guessing I went into the hot house but I may have got that all wrong, although fast forward a few years and  I am convinced it was one of those places I visited on Sundays with new girl friends following the Saturday date at the ABC in the High Street.

There will be plenty who remember the scenario ........ the evening went well, you both wanted to see each other again but wanted a place more casual, and above all cheap.

So Avery Hill fitted the bill giving both of you that added advantage of being able to close down the romance and go your separate ways, allowing the rest of Sunday to be salvaged.

But all that was in the future, back in 1964 my options were more limited and ended up with a walk round the Pleasaunce, a trip up to Wilcox’s opposite the parish church and a trip up to London.

The train journey in itself was an adventure and the noise and bustle of London Bridge or Charing Cross could make up for what had been a dull morning in Well Hall.

At 14, pubs were still off bounds, but there were museums, art galleries and monuments to look at. All were free and most were out of the rain.

And of course by the time you got back the clouds had cleared, the pavements dry and the night held out all sorts of promise.

Location; Eltham

Pictures; Eltham, 2013 from the collection of Jean Gammons